Brought Back a Genre

Rating: 7/10 (19 January 2009)

George Romero shocked the world in 1968 with his film, Night of the Living Dead. It shocked audiences of all ages, disgusted the world, and even helped create the MPAA rating system. It is hard to watch any zombie movie without thinking about Night of the Living Dead.
I myself would have to say that 28 Days Later is the most influential zombie movie since Night of the Living Dead. It might be risky to say that for two reasons: It is hard to compete with a classic, and the zombies in 28 Days aren't truly "zombies." Let's put that argument aside.
28 Days Later is about an infection that almost completely wipes out England. The film follows around a man named Jim (Cillian Murphy) who wakes up in a hospital to empty England. He soon meets up with several other survivors as they try to survive in the zombie infected world.
After several of the survivors incidentally get wiped out by the infection, the two surviving members of the group meet up in an army base with a squad of army men. This is where the movie truly began to fall for me. It started out almost perfect, but then we had to be introduced to an entirely new location, which ruined the originality of the first two-thirds of the movie. I didn't like the army scenes and thought that they not only ripped off George Romero's 1985 film, Day of the Dead, but they dragged my interest away from the true problem.
Putting the final piece of the film aside, 28 Days Later has a number of suspenseful and enjoyable scenes which never fail to keep the viewer hooked. However, most of the movie felt like a build-up that ended in disappointment.
What the movie DOES accomplish is the fact that it has a good cast, not a GREAT cast but a good cast. It was also able to create a whole different kind of zombie film (running zombies). The zombies in 28 Days may be nothing more than infected people, but they are still zombies when it comes to how they're shot. The Dawn of the Dead remake, as well as several other 28 Days Later rip-offs have taken the idea of running zombies of off this film.
Another thing that 28 Days Later manages to do is to entertain, which is one of the key points in making a good movie.